Wayne RashRackspace Managed CloudRackspace Managed Cloud seems focused on making cloud provisioning as easy as possible, management as easy as possible, along with excellent performance at a reasonable price.

Rackspace Managed Cloud seems focused on making cloud provisioning as easy as possible, management as easy as possible, along with excellent performance at a reasonable price.

Rackspace is a managed infrastructure company that's been deeply involved with developing open-source cloud services for the last few years. The company is well along in its transition to providing third-party managed cloud services. This means that, in addition to offering Rackspace's infrastructure, the company can set you up with those from elsewhere. Rackspace is continuing its commitment to OpenStack, which is an open-source, public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Basing its Rackspace Managed Cloud (whose final cost can be determined by contacting the company) on OpenStack has worked out very well. It has resulted in an offering that's fast, effective, fully featured, and seriously easy to use. Though it earns an excellent rating in our IaaS solution review roundup, it didn't garner our Editors' Choice designation, which goes to competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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Rackspace Managed Cloud can run both virtual servers and dedicated physical servers in the same data center and on the same network. This provides a solution to companies where a virtual server won't work, such as when there are issues regarding security where a dedicated server is a requirement. And because these servers share a data center and a network, it's possible to use virtual servers to extend the capability of the dedicated servers to handle unusual workloads.

Rackspace Managed Cloud has six data centers globally. These are concentrated in North America, the European Union (EU), and Asia-Pacific. While this doesn't quite put Rackspace on par with more distributed competitors, like AWS and Google Cloud Platform, it still represents a solid geo-location offering. Platform Rackspace Managed Cloud offers virtual servers that run a variety of Linux distributions as well as Windows Server 2008 and 2012. At the time of my test, Windows 2016 was not available.

The Rackspace Managed Cloud OpenStack public cloud service can be set up in two basic ways. There's a managed infrastructure level and a managed operations level. Managed infrastructure is the less expensive option. The company's tech support staff will help you set up your cloud services, review your choices and options, and help you ensure that your architecture makes sense. But you're the one configuring and managing your cloud server.

Managed operations is more expensive. According to the company, this starts at $500 per month. But Rackspace will handle the architecture and the process of building the configuration you need, and then configure and operate your cloud for you. Your role is in telling Rackspace what you want and then letting the cloud provider do it. Rackers, which is what the company affectionately calls its employees, will also handle all administration. Considering that you won't have to dedicate an employee to this option, it might end up being the least expensive choice, and certainly easier for the average small to midsized business (SMB) than a more DIY-style competitor, like DigitalOcean.

Setup and Configuration

I was able to set up and operate my Rackspace Managed Cloud service on a Microsoft Windows 2012R2 server instance in about 10 minutes. And I was doing it without training the first time I'd actually put my hands to the task. The only complications, which involved remembering a couple of commands for Windows Server, were unrelated to Rackspace Managed Cloud. It was just extremely simple to do.

Rackspace prides itself on having excellent customer support, but in my case, they were underemployed. In other words, there was nothing the support staff needed to do because it all worked on the first try.

Of course, if you're doing anything complicated with Linux or Windows, then you'll need to know how to do it. While Rackspace makes all of its products seriously easy, you can't say the same for Microsoft or Linux teams. But if you know your server well enough to have one in the office, having one in the Rackspace Managed Cloud will not add to the complexity.

Cloud Performance

I got better performance from the virtual server at Rackspace than I did with the other IaaS providers, including high-performance offerings, like IBM Cloud. but that performance bump appeared to be due to configuration limits at Rackspace. The other cloud instances I set up let me create a single CPU core for the virtual server. The minimum I could configure with Rackspace Managed Cloud was two cores. However, it's not clear that more CPU cores had that much to do with the performance, which was only slightly faster than the others in the test.

I used the Geekbench 4 cross-platform benchmark test from Primate Labs to test Rackspace Managed Cloud. This benchmark program runs a variety of integer, floating point, and memory checks. With this benchmark, higher numbers are better. In this case, the benchmark ran on a General1-2 VM with two virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 2 gigabytes (GBs) of RAM, while running 64-bit Windows 2012 R2. Rackspace Managed Cloud delivered a score of 2,217 for the single core test and 3,997 for the multi-core test. It was the fastest of the bunch in the multi-core test.

Pricing and Contract

Rackspace reworked its business plan recently. Instead of trying to be another AWS, it's now offering to manage your AWS instances as well as anything you might have running on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and several other IaaS platforms, all as part of its managed services. This allows the company to broaden its potential customer base while focusing services on ease of use and stability, all of which seems to be working well.

Rackspace is also integrating its own cloud services with the cloud services it manages, so you can arrange a managed cloud service that includes both services from Rackspace and services from another cloud provider, such as AWS.

Rackspace Managed Cloud has changed the way its 100 percent uptime guarantee works. Now, while there's such a guarantee on its data centers, the deal for server replacement in public cloud servers is based on an hourly uptime rate in which you get refunded 5 percent per hour for each hour it's down.

Rackspace Managed Cloud delivers excellent performance. The benchmark test would cost approximately $55 per month. You can work out your numbers using the Rackspace Cloud Calculator. As you work out Rackspace Managed Cloud's costs, keep in mind that Rackspace is a "managed" service provider. This means there's now a minimum service charge of $50 per month for the managed infrastructure service level. If you want the managed operations level, then that adds $500 per month.

I used Rackspace to set up a basic three-tier Ubuntu Linux web application with managed infrastructure service. This is a typical configuration for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). However, when attempting to fit my standard compute configuration into the Rackspace Managed Cloud pricing calculator, I found that things had changed and that the configuration I wanted was no longer appropriate. Instead, Rackspace Managed Cloud recommended a different configuration that would provide better performance at a lower cost.

Based on that recommendation, I wound up used two on-demand Linux instances acting as the app servers, two Cloud Block Storage volumes to act as the storage for these servers, one Cloud Load Balancer, and a preconfigured high availability (HA) pair of MySQL database servers.

The two app servers were the "Compute1-4" flavor, and each have 3.75 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs. For storage, I assigned each Cloud Server a 50GB solid-state disk (SSD) Cloud Block Storage volume. I added on a Cloud Load balancer, and assumed 100 concurrent connections for the month to balance the traffic between the app servers. This was an estimate for budgeting, but Rackspace says the Load Balancer will automatically be able to handle more connections than that if it gets a burst of traffic.

For the database, Rackspace recommended two 1GB MySQL servers that are automatically configured by Rackspace for high availability (HA) and have 50 GB of storage.

For helpdesk tech support, I used the standard free ticket, e-mail, and phone system. This has a 20-minute response time. This package would result in a more resilient web app server, costing $5,450 per year. I could have chosen the fully managed operations package at a cost of $10,848 per year, and I wouldn't need to pay for a system administrator.

For smaller organizations, especially for those without a big IT staff, Rackspace Managed Cloud is almost a no-brainer. Larger organizations, or organizations with very specialized needs, may want to consider cloud services with more expansive portfolios. There are plenty of those larger providers, each with its own focus. But for an organization that needs quality cloud services at a rational price with superb support, the Rackspace Managed Cloud is at the top of the heap.

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About the Author

Wayne Rash's IT Watch Column: www.pcmag.com/it-watch
Wayne Rash is a freelance writer and frequent reviewer of enterprise hardware and software. He is also a Senior Columnist for eWEEK. Email him at wayne@rash.org. Follow him on Twitter @wrash.

Rackspace Managed Cloud

Rackspace Managed Cloud

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